A remarkable thing just happened in the chaotic race for the Republican presidential nomination, and it wasn't the rise of Donald Trump . It was the impressive numbers reported for the first stage of the GOP's "money primary": the competition to raise the hundreds of millions of dollars a White House campaign requires.

A little more than a year ago, President Obama asked Congress for $500 million to train and equip some 15,000 opposition fighters in Syria, arguing that the best way to defeat Islamic State terrorists was to arm local forces.

Sen. Bernie Sanders , the self-described socialist who kicked off his presidential campaign on Tuesday with a characteristically fiery speech, isn't going to win the 2016 Democratic nomination unless lightning strikes. To be really effective, in any case, the lightning would have to strike Hillary Rodham Clinton , who holds a prohibitive lead in every poll. But Sanders will still have a major impact on the Democratic race, and that could, parad...

For most of a generation, Democrats have divided into two broad camps on economic policy. There are "growth Democrats," who argue that a rising tide will lift all boats; that was the reigning view during the Bill Clinton administration under Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence H. Summers. And there are "fairness Democrats," who argue that the central problem is inequality. That's the view of the party's progressive wing, led today by...

Bernie Sanders is on a roll. The independent socialist from Vermont, still not a registered Democrat, is drawing big crowds with his gruff populism: 2,500 people in Council Bluffs, Iowa; 7,500 in Portland, Me.; 10,000 in Madison, Wis. He's raised more than $15 million in mostly small donations — "not from billionaires," he crows. He's rising steadily in the polls; one survey shows him only 8 points behind the once untouchable front-runner, Hill...